The Age Of Trump Clearly Shows That Narrative Is Everything

“Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of judgement mistakes that were made many years ago, & those where we are getting little financial or military help from the rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing, will eventually come to a glorious end!”

The tweet was warmly received and celebrated by Trump’s supporters, despite the fact that it says essentially nothing since “eventually” could mean anything. Indeed, it’s looking increasingly possible that nothing will come of the president’s stated agenda to withdraw troops from Syria other than a bunch of words which allow his anti-interventionist base to feel nice feelings inside. Yet everyone laps it up, on both ends of the political aisle, just like they always do. Trump supporters are acting like he’s a swamp-draining, war-ending peacenik, his enemies are acting like he’s feeding a bunch of Kurds on conveyor belts into Turkish meat grinders to be made into sausages for Vladimir Putin’s breakfast, when in reality nothing has changed and may not change at all.

How are such wildly different pictures being painted about the same non-event? By the fact that both sides of the Trump-Syria debate have thus far been reacting solely to narrative.

Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of judgement mistakes that were made many years ago, & those where we are getting little financial or military help from the rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing, will eventually come to a glorious end!

This has consistently been the story throughout Trump’s presidency: a heavy emphasis on words and narratives and a disinterest in facts and actions. A rude tweet can dominate headlines for days, while the actual behaviors of this administration can go almost completely ignored. Trump continues to more or less advance the same warmongering Orwellian globalist policies and agendas as his predecessors along more or less the same trajectory, but frantic mass media narratives are churned out every day painting him as some unprecedented deviation from the norm. Trump himself, seemingly aware that he’s interacting entirely with perceptions and narratives instead of facts and reality, routinely makes things up whole cloth and often claims he’s “never said” things he most certainly has said. And why not? Facts don’t matter in this media environment, only narrative does.

Look at Russiagate. An excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled “A Look Back at Clapper’s Jan. 2017 ‘Assessment’ on Russia-gate” reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he’s said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive behavior.

That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and it’s completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar, from which countless relevant analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available evidence. It’s pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the “collusion” story is as well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and there’s no evidence that it did.

So now you’ve got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet Union. With the nuclear brinkmanship this administration has been playing with its only nuclear rival on the planet, it would be so incredibly easy for Trump’s opposition to attack him on his insanely hawkish escalation of a conflict which could easily end all life on earth if any little thing goes wrong, but they don’t. Because this is all about narrative and not facts, Democrats have been paced into supporting even more sanctioning, proxy conflicts and nuclear posturing while loudly objecting to any sign of communication between the two nuclear superpowers, while Republicans are happy to see Trump increase tensions with Moscow because it combats the collusion narrative. Now both parties are supporting an anti-Russia agenda which existed in secretive US government agencies long before the 2016 election.

And this to me is the most significant thing about Trump’s presidency. Not any of the things people tell me I’m supposed to care about, but the fact that the age of Trump has been highlighting in a very clear way how we’re all being manipulated by manufactured narratives all the time.

Humanity lives in a world of mental narrative. We have a deeply conditioned societal habit of heaping a massive overlay of mental labels and stories on top of the raw data we take in through our senses, and those labels and stories tend to consume far more interest and attention than the actual data itself. We use labels and stories for a reason: without them it would be impossible to share abstract ideas and information with each other about what’s going on in our world. But those labels and stories get imbued with an intense amount of belief and identification; we form tight, rigid belief structures about our world, our society, and our very selves that can generate a lot of fear, hatred and suffering. Which is why it feels so nice to go out into nature and relax in an environment that isn’t shaped by human mental narrative.

This problem is exponentially exacerbated by the fact that these stories and labels are wildly subjective and very easily manipulated. Powerful people have learned that they can control the way everyone else thinks, acts and votes by controlling the stories they tell themselves about what’s going on in the world using mass media control and financial political influence, allowing ostensible democracies to be conducted in a way which serves power far more efficiently than any dictatorship.

See how both A and B herd the public away from opposing the dangerous pro-establishment agendas being advanced by this administration? The dominant narratives could not possibly be more different from what’s actually going on, and the only reason they’re the dominant narratives is because an alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies exerts an immense amount of influence over the stories that are told by the political/media class.

Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.

The narrative matrix of America’s political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn. It’s psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they’re at on the political spectrum. The only potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether.

Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the establishment propaganda machine is acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the internet are getting more and more severe. It is possible that this is what it looks like when a thinking species evolves into a sane and healthy relationship with thought. Perhaps the cracks that are appearing all over official narratives today are like the first cracks appearing in an eggshell as a bird begins to hatch into the world.

Tags

Share

Latest comments

Regula/January 13, 2019

Caitlin, it was never different. Presidents say what they think the public wants to hear and do what makes most money for Congress people and themselves. The policy of war to subdue the world into US slave workers for the purpose of US world hegemony remains the same and has been the same since 1948 .

Jared/January 10, 2019

I think it is disengenuous to say nothing has changed since Trumps tweet re. withdrawl from Syria. He has nudge the ball a little bit in a better direction. Of course the neowarmongers would fight back. It will take more and better and the outcome is not certain.

It is better to recognize the positive.

The valor is in the struggle.

The enemy is well nigh unbeatable – is sloth, greed, ignorance, indifference.

Bruce Murray/January 9, 2019

Watching the film “Vice” I was struck by the importance of the Fox News style since its implementation in the 90’s. It has been so successful in effecting public opinion that it is now the blueprint for all Mainstream Media, including those who used to regarded as the “liberal left”. It is not that the narrative prior to Fox was ineffective, but just that now there is no pretence at providing straight unbiased news.

ROD SANDERS/January 10, 2019

Accurate to a point. The old “fair & balanced” motto was, and is, a joke. However, in these times, Fox does a better job of distinguishing between news & opinion. I’ve tried to catch the bias in Bret Baier’s nightly newscast on Fox and I haven’t seen it. Shannon Bream’s late newscast is very objective as well. Check them out and please tell me if you can catch them being biased. The 3 hours between those two newscasts are strictly opinion and they’re not trying to hide it. . OTOH, there is obvious extreme bias on the straight newscasts on CNN and MSNBC. I haven’t been able to tell any difference on CNN or MSNBC between programs they present as straight news and those that are clearly opinion. The anchors are so anti-Trump, it’s shocking – or it used to be. They dishonestly claim to be objective, kinda like the old Fox. No matter which channel you view, it’s like the Trump Show, 24/7/365. If they do devote any time to something else, it’s usually pretty short-lived. The media loves to hate Trump.

Dennis ONeill/January 9, 2019

Brilliant analysis as usual.

Trump’s either a complete fluke like a fish out of water in the swamp of Washington, District of Criminals or the best psyop ever run on the U.S. electorate. I tend to believe he’s a fluke. It’s difficult to believe that someone who is loathed by both parties of the two party tyranny that lords over the U.S. could be a psyop, but one never knows. The Clowns In America, and their extensive network of international criminals are psyops geniuses.

Are Trump fans chumps who will one day awaken with sore rumps Being kicked to the curb having already been deluged with blurb after blurb, after blurb…. On a platform called Twitter may set their minds all a jitter For the narrative sounded good and was never comparative

On the last election cycle’s dinner menu was a blend of bumbling Bush Crime Family idiocy, Obama’s phony hopium, Clinton Crime Family obfuscation that’s now been topped off with desert called Russian collusion, which is like Cool Whip.It’s not real it’s phony whipped cream. Until there’s a deep, tall wall on our southern border built by declaring a national emergency, and/or some very big fish like Comey the Clown, Cigar Clinton, and his enabling wife Skankles, Bumbling bonehead GW Bush, Darth Vader Cheney, Don Dumsfeld, Kenyan Obozo, and a few of his hopium dealers, Clap brain infected Clapper, and Gestapo Mueller behind bars, we won’t know for sure. The last U.S. President who tried to drain the swamp was murdered by a cabal that sociopath Allen Dulles, and his brother who had held Skankles Clinton’s last job ran.

ROD SANDERS/January 9, 2019

Haha! What a bunch of fitting monikers! . I wouldn’t come down too hard on Trump for tweeting tho. That’s what make him the most transparent president in history. It also cuts out the middle man media and their nefarious perception shaping interpretations. I think it’s his best attribute. I hope the precedent he has established for communicating directly to the people will continue after he’s gone. I doubt it will because the swamp dwellers need to have everything vetted by the IC and they can’t utter a word impromptu.

Dennis ONeill/January 10, 2019

I hope with all my heart that Trump is for real. However, Twitter or Twatter (using a disgusting term for a certain part of female anatomy), as I like to call it, is a shadow banning, and censoring machine. It’s part of the #GoogleGestapo. The Clowns In America’s venture capital firm, and other deep state actors were early investors, and controllers of Farcebook, and, I believe, other social media giants. Even Ronald Reagan was controlled by, or more likely part of, the deep state which understands the importance of narrative, hence an actor as president in the live, theater of distraction perpetrated on Americans.

If you’re old enough you may recall that the son of fascist, Hitler-financing-thug Prescott Bush, GHW Bush, was not Reagan’s first choice for V.P. He was forced to take on GHW who was a pedophile, and lover of young black boys according to Paul Bonacci, a victim of the Franklin pedophile ring who, along with investigators in Nebraska were either murdered or harassed by the FBI, and other deep state criminals when this pedo ring was bringing children into the White House after hours, which even deep state organ the Washington Compose reported. Bonacci, whose brother died under typically mysterious circumstances during the investigation into Franklin, did win a $1 million civil judgement in the matter. Bonacci said he saw pedo GHW leave with a young black boy at one of the pedo parties. From the moment I first saw GHW Bush speak on television I thought he was probably gay, and he fits the genetic profile of a gay man, which is second born male son after a first born male son, to a mother with a gay brother. That’s about 73% of gay men which is how geneticist found 3 genes on the X chromosome that help explain male homosexuality. Female sexuality is a bit more fluid, and geneticists have not had as much success identifying the genetic components of it. The other thing that was suspicious in my mind about pedo GHW is that he’s a good looking man who married an ugly woman. If you look at photos of pedo Bush, and Barbara when they were young, you see a good looking man, and a dog. Babs was cover for pedo Bush.

G Clevey/January 9, 2019

I’ve been questioning my conditioned state for the last 6 years… I started Questioning at 7 years old, man, that did not go over well… Parents are by the far most influential Popes of dark dope one must overcome… At the ripe age of 70, now it seems to late, other than spreading the news of our conditioned state of mind to my piers whom believe I’m a duffus… But at this point, they are seeing the light and coming out of the myopia of propaganda and self deception. If one is being scorned to some degree, we can begin to see that we are on to something other than the status quo…aka Political correctness, the narrative conditioning from the day we are slapped on our ass… Born into consciousness from the birth canal of a worm hole into a paradigm of false realities and illusion 101… From then on it’s chaos, the educational formula of mass brainwashing… Via brainwashing… pier manipulation, derogatory desolation of mental torture. Teachers that want you to conform to the educational myopia and grade system that gets you a corporate jab… The rhetoric of not being a laborer or craftsmen, all the latter, we find ourselves trapped, by non functional human everyday skills… Zombies of the corporate world, unable to paint a fence or remove a light bulb… Sarcastic as that sounds, we will be a debtor nation relying on slave labor from the other slaves around the world. All this, within misfit psychopathic governments plutocracy of never ending dead ends. Ultimately this will be the fate of the middle classes of any government… Is there any hope of recovery??? The final frontier where no man has been before… History repeats itself as my best friend has stated…we will have to start all over again from the bottom of human suffering as the remorse for our ignorance and complicity. In the entitlement mentalities of this dystopia of mass ignorance, as the blood letting continues to destroy our civilization…

Gino/January 9, 2019

George Tirebiter/January 9, 2019

“Endless Wars…..will eventually come to a glorious end!”

Trump’s statement is correct here on both counts since the control of the global sheep is rapidly shifting from the use of physical force to the use of psychological control and….this will be a glorious end for the psychopathic plutocrats and other assorted parasites that are directing, enabling and profiting from this shit show.

And yes…Trump is (obviously) one of these plutocrats, assigned to play his part by both roping in those who still want to retain some of their freedom and by cleverly keeping them distracted with endless misdirection, while the psychological noose is rapidly tightened thanks to the legions of willing servants of the technocratic state.

I think it is of utmost important that people come to understand your main point here: we are being played all the time and this is nothing new. This is not a ‘Trump thing’, politicians and those who hold the reins of power have always attempted to control the masses. The only thing that might be novel is that more and more people are coming to see behind the curtain of this manipulation. And trust, whether in the mass media or in our political ‘leadership’ is earned through actions not words; and that trust has been increasingly lost as the propaganda and lies are exposed.

David Syme/January 9, 2019

Love ya balls girl! Trump was/is/will be no more than (at best), a rogue oligarch with a few new tricks to keep the entertainment going: ‘jumping the shark’; shuffle the deck; pea/thimble tricks.

He is the goy needed when no gentile hero remains. He is a mentally crippled antinomian (like Nixon). The only thing to ‘save’ us is Putin’s hypersonics to call the Empire’s bluff – but don’t hold your breath!

b/January 8, 2019

ROD SANDERS/January 8, 2019

Interesting pics. He’s much closer to SuperTrump than he is to Hitler. In light of his views on torture, that could change. I do like when he talks non-intervention. It makes me like him more until he starts backpedaling. . I don’t think he’s much like those 3 other presidents tho. They were all strictly politicians. His business background is an important distinction. They’re all figureheads who did pretty much what they were told to do. Trump is more of a discipline problem for the Deep State, but he eventually falls in line. We have a lot more world to dominate so I wouldn’t get too hopeful over that cracked eggshell just yet.

Dennis ONeill/January 9, 2019

Full scale international fascism has not quite yet been implemented, but we’re nearly there. The U.S. two party tyranny is working overtime on behalf of the Nazis that were brought to the U.S. after WWII to get the job done.

Old Joe/January 8, 2019

“We have a deeply conditioned societal habit of heaping a massive overlay of mental labels and stories on top of the raw data we take in through our senses, and those labels and stories tend to consume far more interest and attention than the actual data itself”

From my current perspective, I wonder how much of those layers and labels and stories I’m missing because I got off social media and don’t watch corporate news? Or perhaps instead of saying I’m missing them, the more correct phrasing would be that I am deliberately filtering out. Besides, I certainly don’t miss any of it. 🙂

Of a long habit. Decades ago I joined the counter-culture. And with that came a habit of deliberately avoiding and filtering out all of the messaging that a modern society, even in 1980’s tech levels, was throwing at a person.

I think that was something the old hippies got correct. You need to block out and filter the massive media culture being thrown at individuals. And you can’t just leave a vacuum there, as nature abhors those, so you have to replace it with an alternate culture. Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out, was Leary’s saying, but the tuning in was tuning in to a new broadcast and dropping out was dropping into a counter-culture that would greet you with open arms.

I am not saying to just blindly copy old hippies, but I do believe that a part of any successful resistance has to be an alternative culture that is open to all and treats everyone with fairness and hopefully kindness. Open to all because Resisting corporate power and its war machine is going to take a whole lot of people. Its gonna take all the people we can get, and then hope and pray that we got enough before its over. So, it has to be a mass movement open to everybody.

Tommy Wright/January 9, 2019

Old Hippy here, and I think you are right and you correctly label it a Culture War, its not an information war, it’s a knowledge war that will bring forth into the world a new culture based on the exploration of space and inner conscious awareness, manifesting that culture..

Caitlin’s brilliant insights and I would venture even, ‘second sights’ are just what is needed to shove the balls down the throat of patriarchy foisted on us by the followers of Abraham who realized his sin of sacrificing his child, and the sin of his brothers when he realized that human sacrifice was and is, the original sin.

Jesus taught us to love and honor children, and to become as little children ourselves. Still the witnesses of Jehovah persist in sacrificing humans, but their days are numbered thanks to peeking behind the veil of secrets (narratives) we are being deceived by. Simply put, murder is not a means to an end, it is the end itself. This narrative will not stand.

Truth is, knowledge is structured in consciousness, awareness, and CJ is right on the mark.You too, btw.

Peace is the narrative we can live and thrive under as one culture. Believe it..

Tweets

Here's an Israeli government official calling Michelle Alexander's column in the NYT about Palestinian rights, based on MLK's philosophy, a "strategic threat," and warns that Israel will "treat it as such." How will Israel treat Alexander's column as a "strategic threat"? Creepy

Facebook feed

"NewsGuard is led by some of the most virulently pro-imperialist individuals in America and its agenda to shore up narrative control for the ruling power establishment is clear, writes Caitlin Johnstone."

NewsGuard is led by some of the most virulently pro-imperialist individuals in America and its agenda to shore up narrative control for the ruling power establishment is clear, writes Caitlin Johnstone. By Caitlin Johnstone CaitlinJohnstone.com The frenzied, hysterical Russia narrative being prom ... See more

Excerpt from "Fight The Establishment’s Narratives By Getting Clear On Your Own":

Anti-establishment movements are a mess. Whether they’re left-wing or right-wing, whether they’re statist or anarchist, whether they’re organized or decentralized, whether they place emphasis on official or unofficial narratives, any circle of people who are interested in opposing the status quo on a deep, meaningful level almost invariably find themselves significantly bogged down by confusion, paranoia, infighting, and misdirected use of energy.

Every day, for example, I get people in my inbox and social media notifications telling me I shouldn’t quote or share anything from this or that lefty journalist or anti-establishment figure because they’ve said something “problematic” at some point or have some kind of association with some aspect of the establishment. Rather than simply using narrative-disrupting tools wherever they come from to fight the establishment narrative control machine, I’m encouraged to isolate myself to the extremely narrow spectrum of voices which agree with my exact worldview perfectly. This kind of paranoid, self-cannibalizing mentality is rife throughout most anti-establishment circles.

This happens for a number of reasons, including the fact that the ruling power establishment will infiltrate dissident movements that it perceives as a threat with the intent of sowing confusion and division. But the underlying reason anti-establishment circles so often find themselves getting crushed by their own weight is ultimately because life itself is confusing and difficult to understand.

Hardly anyone holds a lucid and steady awareness of just how much of society is comprised of mental narrative. Most people live their lives under the unquestioned assumption that when they are moving around in the world, speaking, acting, forming opinions, having ideas etc, they are interacting with something that resembles objective reality. The truth of the matter is that most of the things which draw people’s attention in their day-to-day experience, whether it’s names, titles, news stories, political parties, economics, history, philosophy, religion or what have you, consist entirely of mental noises firing off inside human skulls.

Excerpt from "Fight The Establishment’s Narratives By Getting Clear On Your Own":

You might think it’s a big jump to go from chatting about the sociopolitical dynamics within dissident movements to making vaguely Buddhist-sounding observations about human thought, but it’s really not. The reason our species is in a mess right now, and thus the reason movements exist which seek to change the status quo, is because so much of life is dictated entirely by made-up mental narratives which can be easily controlled by the powerful, and hardly anyone fully grasps this. If they did, the revolution against the establishment would very smoothly and quickly succeed.

Scientific research has found that astronauts suffer problems with coordination, perception and cognition when they are unable to determine which way is up in space. There is no “up” or “down” when you’re outside the gravitational pull that our bodies are adapted to, so its absence sends our whole system out of whack. Navigating a society that is made of mental narrative is very much the same; if you don’t know which way’s up, you’ll get lost and confused. Before you can see the narrative matrix clearly, you might be aware that some narratives serve power and swat at them while you’re spinning through space, but you won’t have any solid ground on which to orient yourself for the purpose of forming a clear path forward toward a healthy and harmonious world.

Your first and foremost task as a revolutionary, therefore, is to find solid ground on which to plant your feet while operating within a swirling sea of narratives and counter-narratives. Without this you’ll find yourself expending energy on ineffectual agendas, chasing shadows, attacking friends and advancing the interests of the enemy as you stumble around trying to fight a threat you can’t even see clearly. You’ve got to figure out for yourself which way’s up.